Several years ago, I wrote about a second political spectrum that intersects with the first. There is our well-known left-right political axis, with which we’re all familiar. But there is also an up-down axis, I argued—a second line that I dubbed the Respectrum. The Respectrum is an indicator of how we interact around politics, rather than what we believe. We might be respectful, curious, and open (at the axis’s top) or disdainful, rigid, and dismissive (at its bottom).
The Respectrum doesn’t correspond to the left-right axis. It moves in a different direction—up-to-down, not left-to-right. That’s because a person can hail from the left, right, or center and be civil and respectful, or not.
In recent years, as Trump has been running his second campaign and regaining the presidency, I’ve continued picturing our politics in this way, with two intersecting axes in my mind. But the vertical axis has morphed in my thinking, and I’m no longer picturing respect vs. disdain as the criteria my new chart measures. I still think the “Respectrum” is useful, but nowadays I am thinking more broadly: I picture freedom, and truth, and democracy on one end of the line, and darkness and dictatorship on the other.
It seems to me that what we have been fighting for, in the decade since Trump first entered politics, is the very soul of our country. I think many people are missing clarity about what that fight entails, and the axis along which it most truly runs. This post is an attempt at that clarity.
The resistance against Trump has been muddled and confused in part because it fails to distinguish between the two axes. Instead, it often lumps the two together, mistaking one for the other. People often put Trump’s authoritarian moves—his attacks on the press, his deployment of the National Guard, his attempt at a coup—into the same category with his right-wing policies that they also dislike, such as cutting taxes for the wealthy, cutting aid to Africa, and aggressively closing the borders. This miscategorization is a fatal error: fatal to the resistance movement, and fatal to democracy.
There are key distinctions Americans need to make. We must learn to see the difference between opposing someone’s policies and opposing their methods. We must learn to distinguish between disagreeing with an opponent and wanting to silence them.
Nowadays, the up-down axis I most often picture is one I call the Axis of Democracy. Authoritarianism lurks on the bottom of this line. Healthy democracy shines like a beacon at the top.
Much of the time, the Axis of Democracy runs parallel to the Respectrum—but the two are not the same. Respect, curiosity, and openness are desirable and worthy goals, but they are not essential for democracy to function. What is essential, at minimum, is tolerance.
Diana Mutz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies political communication, says that tolerance occurs when we feel negatively about another group but support their civil liberties anyway. Tolerance is the acknowledgement, however grudging, that someone with whom we disagree should have the same rights we have.
Tolerance is agreeing to others’ right to free speech, however abhorrent their speech may be to you. Even in democracies with some limits on hate speech—there are such limits in many European countries—the definition of hate speech must still be exceedingly narrow. Freedom of speech must by and large be protected, because it is an essential ingredient for democracy.
In general, in a democracy, most ideas must be allowed to be aired. In a democracy, ideas must be defeated not by silencing them but through rigorous, open debate.
Never has the Axis of Democracy been clearer in my mind than right now, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I had barely heard of Kirk before Wednesday, although I knew vaguely that he was a Trump-supporting activist. Nevertheless, upon first hearing he had been killed, my first reaction was grief and horror. Not because I agreed with him on any policies—I knew it was likely that I did not—but because he was a young husband, a father, and an American political figure with a constitutional right to free speech.
The attack on Kirk was an attack on all of us. It was an attack on all of our freedom.
This was far from the first such attack. Politicians from the left and the right have been similarly targeted, especially in recent months—the dead-of-night assassination of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband is perhaps the most chilling example. But because of Charlie Kirk’s national prominence, and because of his youth and promise, and because of the spectacular, public way his assassination unfolded, for me his death has been the most shocking of all.
I have watched my fellow liberals grope with how to react to this death. While most are disturbed, their disturbance has sometimes been muted, muddied by the tribal left-right thinking to which so many Americans have succumbed. Most people on the left, like me, did not know much about Kirk, if they’d heard of him at all. But at a glance, after his death they could easily learn about his conservative views—for instance, that he hated DEI (and had called MLK an awful person), that he was dismissive of climate change, and that he was against gun control. For many, these and other facts about him have cooled the feelings of outrage or alarm they might have otherwise felt about his murder. He was not “one of us.” He was Other. Perhaps, a few people’s thinking goes, he even deserved to die, since he seemed so callous about the deaths of others to gun violence.
I am certain this muted reaction was mirrored by conservatives in the wake of Melissa Hortman’s assassination, and after the previous attacks on Josh Shapiro and Paul Pelosi, all of them Democrats. One of our first impulses, on learning that a political figure has been attacked, is to ask what side they were on. Many people then dole out their sympathy in some proportion to how much they agree with the victims’ stances.
These sentiments are natural in such divided times, but they are wrong. If we’re going to repair our democracy, we cannot allow ourselves to dismiss violence against anyone, even and especially against those with whom we disagree. Dismissal equals permission. Violence cannot be permitted. It must be denounced, from all quarters, in no uncertain terms.
Liberals will protest: But Trump and his movement do not adequately denounce this kind of violence—not when it comes our way. President Trump has announced that Kirk will get a Medal of Freedom. Where is the Medal of Freedom for Hortman? Why should we speak in defense of Charlie Kirk and others like him, if they wouldn’t do the same for us?
To this I say:
We are battling for the soul of our country, and this battle has two axes, not just one. One axis runs left-to-right, and that’s where we fight about policy, gun control, human rights, climate change, health care. That left-right axis is where we argue with Trump and his movement about Ukraine, about taxes, about transgender rights.
But the other axis runs up-to-down. This axis is where we battle for our very democracy: our freedoms, our rights, the values that all Americans must share. This axis does not run left-to-right, and because of that, it presents an opportunity to band together with people from across the left-right spectrum in order to defeat Trump’s authoritarianism. We must therefore distinguish between policy and practice, between the what and the how of things he is doing. We will always have disagreements with conservatives about the what. We must find ways to join with some of them on the how.
Trump is at the very bottom of the Axis of Democracy. He neither understands nor respects the Constitution, and many of his actions have been moving us rapidly towards dictatorship. He is also deeply tribal—he will not necessarily come to our assistance in times of need, and he is likely to blame us and demonize us and put targets on our backs when things go wrong, just as he already began blaming and demonizing the left for Kirk’s death before a suspect had even been identified. Right now, as I finish and publish this post, the killer is in custody—but no matter his background, I am certain Trump will find some way to continue placing blame on us.
We must denounce Kirk’s death anyway. In order for us to win on the Axis of Democracy, we cannot be like Trump; we must be better than him. We must be clear where he is not clear. We must be clear about democracy, clear about its principles. We must shout those principles from the rooftops.
Those principles include:
Freedom of speech—even speech we dislike.
Freedom of the press—even press we dislike.
The rule of law—even laws we dislike, until we can get them changed.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—even for people we dislike.
These are the kinds of things we must also fight for, along with our left-right values. We must fight for these democratic values hardest of all, because democracy underlies everything. Democracy is what will make our future policy gains possible. Without it, all our gains of the last two hundred and fifty years will be lost. There are no egalitarian autocracies.
Charlie Kirk did not believe in gun control, and I think he was wrong. I think that stricter nationwide gun laws might have saved him. That is a conversation to have, but it is not the main one to have, because it is not what his death was about.
As much as I disagree with Kirk’s stance on guns, he absolutely had the right to speak and debate that stance. Without knowing the assassin’s motives, what is certain is that Kirk is dead because he was a prominent political figure exercising his free-speech rights. That is all anyone needs to know to condemn his death and grieve with his family. May he rest in peace.
This piece is an elegant summation of how I feel about politics.
There is one problem: history has found only one way to stop fascists who are bent on actually destroying their “enemies” – to kill them. Unfortunately we can’t respect them to death.
This is the conundrum of The Golden Rule with which any thinking human has to contend.
Timothy, I’m glad my thoughts resonate with you, but I must address what you say about killing fascists. I don’t know what exactly you mean, but I’m going to err on the side of assuming you may sympathize somewhat with Kirk’s killer. I might be wrong in this assumption, since you do say I’ve captured how you feel in my post. But it’s crucial to unequivocally oppose political violence, so I’m choosing to do so here.
What you say about the need for violence against fascists “who are bent on actually destroying their enemies” is what many people in the Antifa movement unfortunately and dangerously believe. The problem is twofold: 1) Many people cast a very broad net in defining “bent on actually destroying their enemies” and in labeling others “fascists.” My guess is that Kirk’s killer justified this horrific assassination this way, deciding that Kirk was a fascist who was bent on destroying his enemies. And more importantly, 2), this thinking doesn’t hold up to scrutiny anyway.
There are historical examples of authoritarian people and regimes being defeated through peaceful means.
In our country, authoritarian movements or leaders have been defeated peacefully at various times. Look at McCarthyism, which eventually subsided; Nixon’s corrupt administration, which ended in disgrace; the rise and fall of the KKK; the effectiveness of MLK’s nonviolent resistance movement. Look up the work of Erica Chenowith, who started her research believing that violent resistance was necessary at times, then concluded, after exhaustively studying resistance movements, that only nonviolent resistance is effective for making lasting change.
Pinochet’s Chile was a dictatorship, but it eventually ended peacefully after years of mostly peaceful resistance, when his own military junta refused to follow his orders. The country regained its democracy.
In Spain, after Franco died in 1975, the country transitioned more or less peacefully to a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Some internet searching will find you more historical examples, for instance on this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/s/YAieQ6Keq9.
This sentiment about the “need” to kill fascists is exactly the kind of wrong (and violent) thinking I oppose. In my chart, it places those who think it at the bottom along with right-wing authoritarians. I sincerely hope you will rethink it.